Is there anyway to export GIFS from photoshop without degrading the quality?
I usually go save for web>save as a 128 color gif and this always messes up the quality badly. Tried as 256 color but still ruins quality.
I feel like I am doing something wrong
There is no way to make a 256 colour GIF look better than it does. It's because it is limited to 256 colours... this is intrinsic to the colour-depth of the format (8-bit), so it will always look crap compared to a 24+ bit JPEG/PNG formats where there are a contrasting 16+ million possible colours for any one pixel.
You have few alternatives when it comes to animation on the web of photorealistic content:
1) Use a video file
2) Use a SWF (not ideal)
3) Use JPEG/PNG images of each frame and animate with JS/CSS.